Drip marketing: what it is and how to do it?

Drip marketing is essentially a communication strategy that entails sending customers a premeditated message (usually in written format and usually through email).

These messages are also known as ‘drips’ hence the term drip marketing.

What this approach does is fragment the information meant to be relayed to the customer and spread it across a period of time with the hopes that the customer is not overwhelmed and is convinced about the brand or product in stages.

For better understanding, this can be viewed as a subset of email marketing (although drip marketing is not exclusive to email marketing it is the most popular approach to do it through email)

This means that drip marketing does not aim to generate a sale in the first interaction, or even after the first few.

Some important features of drip marketing are as follows:

Has high relevance:

Drip marketing messages are usually highly relevant and specific to your needs. Each lead is treated as an individual.

They are personalized:

The employment of drip marketing means your leads are subjected to highly personalized and unique content. The kind that is specific to the individual and is based on their interests and requirements.

The priority given to individual variables is extremely high.

Heavily dependent on user behaviour:

All the content that is received by the user is triggered by some behaviour on their part, it could be browsing, adding things to the cart, or even making a purchase.

Drip marketing uses this behaviour to gauge what and when to relay messages to the user.

This is known to dramatically increase the chances of the user making a purchase.

The messages are pre-written:

The messages are obviously written beforehand, anticipating certain behaviour.

Emails are not drafted as and when the customer exhibits interest as that would be a tedious process.

Having the messages written beforehand is convenient since it can be relayed immediately when triggered by appropriate customer behaviour.

It is automated and meant to be sent on a schedule:

It goes without saying that this entire process is an automated one and is time sensitive, two things that this marketing approach is hinged on it is tedious to manually send out these triggers and they are only potent when sent out at a particular time.

Some important and quantifiable advantages of employing drip marketing are as follows:

Studies show that drip marketing yields better results as compared to its counterparts such as mass emailing in terms of revenue harvests. They are shown to be 18 times better to be precise.

Boosts click-through rate:

Drip emails result in a higher percentage of people even opening the email (when compared with regular emailing and mass emailing)

Helps in nurturing leads:

Based on the quality of the content you deliver, drip marketing could potentially help you be perceived a certain way by your customers. It could also potentially lead to procuring loyal customers.

That is only when executed properly. Using drip marketing could be very advantageous but only when executed with precision and thought.

A good way to keep people informed:

This is a very effective way of keeping potential customers in the loop about what is happening with the brand, whether there are any new additions, sales, or offers.

It can also be used for the purpose of educating customers on certain products or services (if need be).

Education (in terms of products and services) is known to be most efficient when it is done in calibrated steps as opposed to all at once. Moreover, this method isn’t as aggressive as its counterparts which in turn makes the customers more inclined to engage.

Saves time:

It’s no doubt that creating a drip marketing campaign takes a whole lot of effort and time in the beginning, but due to its automated nature, it ends up saving time in the long run considering it comes in handy during promotions and invitations.

Convenient to draft:

Nowadays the process of creating a draft has gotten exceedingly simple, so much so that there are multiple templates that exist and you can make use of them.

These pre-designed templates help you save more time while allowing you to add in whatever variables you want.

Some steps you should consider while creating a drip market campaign are as follows:

Put together a mailing list that is populated with relevant email Id(s)

Design an email template or use a pre-existing email template to employ during the process

Decide on the start flow you want to use

Proceed to add more emails to the flow

Launch the drip marketing email campaign

On a concluding note, it is essential to mention that drip marketing has immense potential but only if it is harnessed and employed appropriately.

With the investment of time and effort, this could lead to a boost in sales.